Field
Aspects of the present invention generally relate to an image forming apparatus that prints an image based on an attached file of an electronic mail received from a mail server.
Description of the Related Art
An image forming apparatus including a function for receiving an electronic mail from a mail server and printing an image based on an attached file of the received electronic mail has been known. An image forming apparatus including such a function can receive electronic mails from a mail server at predetermined time intervals and/or based on a user's manual instructions. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 5-176146 discusses an image forming apparatus that, if instructed by a user to abort printing while printing an image transmitted by facsimile, can abort a facsimile reception operation and abort the printing.
After printing of an image starts with some print settings, a user may sometimes notice an imperfection in the print settings and want to abort the printing in process and restart the printing with changed print settings.
The image forming apparatus discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 5-176146 can, if instructed to abort printing while printing the image transmitted by facsimile, abort the printing. However, reprinting of the image is not taken into consideration.
If printing of an image based on a file received from an external device is instructed to be aborted, the image can be reprinted by performing control to abort the printing so that the received file or the image is left inside the image forming apparatus. Such processing enables reprinting after the print settings are changed.
An image forming apparatus with limited hardware resources (storage area in particular) unfortunately does not have much storage area for temporarily storing data. If images needed for printing are temporarily stored in such an image forming apparatus, the storage area becomes tight and an operation of other functions of the image forming apparatus may be affected.
Take a case of printing an image based on an attached file of an electronic mail received from a mail server. If the electronic mail still remains in a mail box on the mail server, the image forming apparatus can receive the same electronic mail again and perform reprinting. However, electronic mails are usually deleted from the mail server after the electronic mails have been received. If the electronic mail is deleted while the printing is aborted, the reprinting is not able to be performed.